Digital Media Thoughts has some information about a fourth generation iPod, or so they are claiming. Sounds plausible to me, but also, upon further thought, sounds like something one could easily have cooked up.

Apparently, I am sponsoring The Atlanta ColdFusion User Group’s Next Meeting, which features Ben Forta as its speaker. Over the years, ACFUG has been very kind to me and to my career. I am happy to be both a board member and a sponsor.

They featured GasBuddy on some television show that happened to be on in my bedroom. For some reason, I can’t remember what show it was, but that’s unimportant. If you need to find the cheapest gas around you, gasbuddy.com is the place you need to surf. Me, I don’t drive so much.

Thomas Friedman : “There is something even more important to the Bush crowd than getting Iraq right, and that’s getting re-elected and staying loyal to the conservative base to do so.”

Google Groups use of Atom represents the first non-Blogger area of Google’s operation that standardizes on Atom. (via Kottke)

Fast Company: Are All Consultants Corrupt?

Six Apart launches Movable Type Developer Edition 3.0 and a contest for developers.

Rob Brooks-Bilson has a very interesting wishlist for the next version of ColdFusion. I couldn’t agree more about the enhancements to the CF Scheduler that he requests, and number 36 “Add XML validation against a DTD” is something that a lot of people, myself included, want very badly. I would add an overhaul of Query of Queries to this list, it is problematic quite a bit of the time, and it’s typing infrastructure behaves in a predictable but somewhat ridiculous manner.

Hollywoodreporter.com: “Valenti: Filtering smoking is filmmakers' call”

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas screenshots

Gothamist: NYC Is Smoking Less. This is good news, and I am happy to report that my brother Chris is a member of that 11 percent. It’s also proof, in part, that banning smoking in bars is effective. It’s funny to me, because, here in Georgia, I hear a lot of people, and I mean a real lot, saying that they shouldn’t ban smoking in bars. The longer I go without a cigarette, the more I think it is a good idea.

Subtraction: Outraged by the Outrage at All the Outrage: “One of the most frustrating tricks that conservative politicians manage to actually get away with is the inversion of indignation, i.e., taking an offensive position on issues where clearly, all good sense would indicate that they should be defensive.”

EEG News: EA, Microsoft Bury Hatchet. and there was cheering in the hills, and also on Xbox Live. About frigging time they got it sorted out.

Outkast are filming their newest video at the end of my street in an old gas station.

I ratcheted the commenting requirements down to anyone. I’m going to see if that effects things much, and if it does, I might ratchet the setting back up.

G4 and TechTV Merger FAQ: “What will the merged network be called? G4techTV” Umm, I’m not a branding expert, or even a branding novice really, but even I know that G4techTV is an awful name for a cable network. How about just “T!”?

Engadget has some photo’s of Sony’s PSP Handheld. I4U goes a step further with specs and all kinds of other PSP information. Even more from Engadget.

Rating Bar puts a small iTunes star rating widget in your menu bar, making it easy to rate your music. I currently use the keyboard commands in Synergy to do this same thing and more(displays album artwork at the beginning of a new song, and provides play etc controls). It got me to thinking that it might be useful to list the ones that I use here for other folks to check out.

So those are the first two from left to right. The third one is BluePhoneMenu. It adds a menu with Signal and Battery strength for your Bluetooth enabled and supported phone (I have the Sony Ericcson T61x.) It also does on screen call notification, which is quite handy if you are a headphone wearing fool like myself.

Fourth from the left is the ubiquitous Quicksilver. I'll save everyone yet another description of this invaluable utility. Next to it is SlimBatteryMonitor which saves me some screen real estate on the menu bar for more utilities without taking away the functionality of the Apple battery monitor.

Next to that is the excellent, donationware, Menu Calendar. It gives me the current date without any hassles, access to a monthly calendar, and easy access to iCal. The rest are all Apple provided ones, Airport, Displays, Applescript, Security, Bluetooth, and Sound.

Got any that you can't live without that I missed? That's what the comments are for baby!!

Ben gives a brief state of the platform comment, and then asks for feedback.

Well, in addition to relaunching Blogger, Google launched a Google Blog. Oddly, Evan signs his first post inside of the post itself, and it appears that they have turned off attribution in the posted/permalink section of each post. I’m guessing that this means we won’t have any idea who posted things unless they want us to know:-)

hymn – Hear Your Music aNywhere: “The purpose of hymn is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. It allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases from their DRM restrictions with no sound quality loss. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes. It works on Mac OS X, many unix(-ish) variants and on Windows.”

Mark and Sarah Foo are engaged. They are both great, and even better together.

In an effort to go completely overboard with Blogger relaunch stuff and get it out of my system, I now link to Blogger’s RSS Decision: Atom Only. I completely agree with Dan about this. It’s worth mentioning that Blogger’s claim, that different XML syndication formats are problematic for their application, is a load of crap. Forget for a moment the server farm argument that Dan presents in his opinion piece, and consider how Blogger works at a core level. They take post information, which is stored in a relational database, and then push that information through a publishing engine, which grabs your custom template and pushes your structured post information into that template in pre-defined locations. So they are already storing millions of different output formats (everyone’s templates), and publishing information through all of them, but they can’t support two xml outputs at the same time? If this is the case, they might want to revisit their application architecture. If you have an argument against something technical, present that argument, but don’t raise some fud argument that any reasonable, semi-technical person can see through. As a former Pro user, I can still publish good old rss. However, I cannot publish both RSS and Atom at the same time, and this irks me.

Whitespace has a comparison: Blogger vs. TypePad. Acts of Volition has some Thoughts on Template Design of the new “rockstar” designed templates. PB, who was one of the OG Blogger folks, has some thoughts about the lack of evolution of Blogging tools/entry interfaces.

Stopdesign has the skinny on the Blogger rework from an interface perspective. There is also a Blogger article about the rework from their side of the project.